The romantic weepie We Live in Time makes cancer remarkably cosy
Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh are charismatic enough to overpower the very English fantasy of this calendar-hopping love story
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Your support makes all the difference.People don’t live like the people in We Live in Time. Yes, they fall in love. They have children. They get sick. Yet real life is a forward march; cinema of this breed is a dainty skip across the stepping stones.
Tobias (Andrew Garfield) has reached rock bottom. Having climbed out of his depression bath, the crumbs of his HobNob depression meal still at the corners of his mouth, he discovers there isn’t a single, functioning pen or pencil he can use to sign his divorce papers. And so he hobbles out of his hotel room in nothing but a dressing gown, only to be promptly hit by a car driven by Almut (Florence Pugh), the future love of his life.
Suddenly, Almut and Tobias have a kid, Ella (Grace Delaney), and they’re in a family-style restaurant trying to explain that Almut’s ovarian cancer has returned. A magician interrupts them. For a moment, they relinquish their pleasantly frazzled, human Paddington Bear personalities in order to bark at the poor employee to leave. We never actually hear what they tell Ella, because while reality never grants us shelter from the ugly, uncomfortable truth, cinema has the ability to give us blinders, a tight embrace, and a warm cup of tea. We Live in Time is about as cosy as a film about cancer can be.
Director John Crowley is able to tell his love story out of sequence – in three main timelines: the meet-cute, the initial cancer diagnosis, and its recurrence – because we can practically dance through these steps with our eyes closed. It’s both the film’s ultimate appeal and biggest limitation since, for a tragic weepie, it’s refreshingly interested in the preciousness of joy. A dramatic turn pauses so that Tobias and Almut can fish their favourite chocolates out of a Celebrations box; the film’s birth sequence ropes in an unexpected pair of heroes who proudly fist bump at its end; while Pugh is allowed free rein of that wondrous, throaty laugh of hers.
Tobias and Almut don’t really exist much as people beyond the quirks and habits embedded in Nick Payne’s script. Tobias is the anxious yet gentle traditionalist, a data steward at Weetabix who responds to hardship by whipping out his notebook and glasses. Almut is the restless bisexual, a chef specialising in “modern European takes on classic alpine dishes” who displays an almost compulsive need to enter the Bocuse d’Or, the “culinary Olympics”, even when months of chemotherapy beckon.
We can happily invest in their love, because We Live in Time is essentially a slow romance between the audience and the on-screen charms of its leads. In fact, it’s hard to think of any other actor outside of Garfield who could convince us that a man’s just been moved to the brink of tears by a Bavarian sausage. Somehow he does it and we believe him wholeheartedly. Pugh has a quiet force to her, which boosts the film’s one, intriguing narrative thread, in which a young woman stood face to face with the end tries to grapple with the idea of legacy. What kind of person will her daughter remember her as?
Yet because of the way we leap in and out of these people’s lives, there’s usually very little sense of how Tobias and Almut mutate in the face of love, and Payne overcompensates by pumping in slightly absurd conflicts to get his point across. Tobias breaches the topic of children early on in the relationship. Almut blows up. “F*** you for even asking!” she spits back. It’s hard to gauge what’s really going on here. But, then again, truth in We Live in Time matters little. All emotions here are predetermined. The point is that we’ve simply been given licence to feel.
Dir: John Crowley. Starring: Andrew Garfield, Florence Pugh, Grace Delaney. Cert 15, 107 mins
‘We Live in Time’ is in cinemas from 1 January
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